[Stitcher]

If Primary-Care Docs Are Paid More, Will Specialists Get Less?

The Wall Street Journal, By James A. White, April 27, 2009, 3:01 PM ET
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/04/...ists-get-less/

It’s hard to find anyone who opposes the idea of boosting financial incentives for primary-care physicians as a way to help reduce the shortage of docs in that field. The trick is trying to decide where money for those incentives would come from.

Dr. Peter J. Mandell, a spokesman for the American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons, underscores the rub in a front-page piece in this morning’s New York Times. “We have no problem with financial incentives for primary care. We do have a problem with doing it in a budget-neutral way,” he says.

More Medicare money for general practitoners would come out of the higher payments that specialists now receive under many –- though not all — of the proposals being discussed in Congress.

The bottom line for the orthopaedic group: “If there’s less money for hip and knee replacements, fewer of them will be done for people who need them,” Mandell told the NYT.